Healthy Behavior

"Couple days. I'm probably gonna get a cover story out of this. Why do you ask?"

"Oh nothing. Just wanna make sure you get enough time to get everything, plus have a bit of fun. So, shall we get started?"

"Sure. Lemme fish the tape recorder out my purse."

"OK. Tell me when to start."

"Alright. First, tell me a bit about your background, sir, er, ma'am, er…"

***

Well, this is gonna be an interesting one. Let me cut right to the chase. The name's Khalil Allen Stanford, or at least that's what the Feds call me. I was born in Brooklyn January 25, 1972. Came up through the public school system, a proud product of Bed-Stuy, and did well enough on the placement test to get into Brooklyn Tech. You could say I'm somewhat special, though not particularly so. After all, if you root around enough neighborhoods in town, you could find a few thousand kids like me. As for childhood, it was NYC standard issue…playing ball, listening to hip-hop mix tapes, chasing tail on the subway, the usual. Simply put, I wasn't one of those guys who rooted around their mama's draw looking for frilly things to wear. I'm about as atypical as they come when it comes to that.

Now here's the part you've been waiting for ma'am. After scoring perfect on my math SAT, and going 1560 overall, I had my choice of schools. Harvard, Yale, you name it. However, I chose Stanford. It had a pretty sweet CS department, and it was on the West Coast. The fact that Stanford threw at me a scholarship with so much money that it's probably illegal in a dozen states didn't hurt either. So I went to Stanford, class of 1994. Yes, THE class of 1994. Yahoo, Excite, LinkExchange, yadda yadda yadda, blah blah blah. Oh and the Stanford name? Who knows? Maybe the founder owned my ancestors in the Caribbean. Whatever.

So I settled down out there, came back east for the major breaks and in the interim became the best damn Perl hacker anyone wearing Cardinal has ever seen. I became very famous in the CS department for my skills. The fame led to me doing some consulting work for Yahoo and Excite during my senior year and right after graduation. In fact, you know that when you visit Yahoo, you call up my script? Sure, it's been tweaked around the edges since I got started on it, but it's still pretty much my baby.